I played another game of Warhammer: The Old world last week, this time a 4 player game run a 2 vs 2 with me and my regular gaming buddy (High Elves and Wood Elves) taking on two opponents who were running Vampire Counts and Chaos Warriors.  We each took 1,500 points (so 3,000 per side) and ran a simple pitched battle. It was good fun and 3,000 points per side made for a good game, though with those points restricted to 1,500 per player it meant that there weren’t any truly overpowered characters or units on the table.

Overall, it was a really fun game, and shows that The Old World rules are smooth enough to give a fun game as long as you’ve got good opponents who have a similar outlook to you. There were a few moments where there were rules queries and we resolved them amicably but there wasn’t always an easy answer, or a quick answer (as always with Warhammer and GW games the rules aren’t always in the spot you would expect them to be in the rulebook).

The end result was a victory for the elves, my force was almost completely intact at the end and the wood elves had only lost a few skirmishing units. We had leaned into the fact that we both had lots of archers available and took shooting heavy armies, with a few hard line units to engage in combat if/when any evildoers made it to our side of the table. In short, we set up a gun line and waited for them to come to us. It worked pretty well, the forces of evil had no real shooting to speak of, and—amusingly—the vampire counts kept raising new zombies which continually blocked the path of his ally’s fast moving units like chariots.

At the end of 4 turns we had shot up most of the Chaos army and the remining vampire counts units that made it into combat weren’t strong enough to break the elves’ line and so we called the game for the elves.

We hope to do more soon.

I have also been assembling and painting my High Elves army. Most of the infantry is pictured here, and I also have a few monsters and dragons and all 3 of the classic cavalry units to add as well (a large unit of Dragon Princes, some Silver Helms, and some Ellyrian Reavers) as well as 3 chariots and another great eagle (a very useful unit in The Old World). In all it should be a big army when complete. I probably won’t add Phoenix Guard or any other infantry units unless there is a release or re-release of some models that I just cannot resist (though GW prices are to be honest a bit too eye watering for me these days…I was sorely tempted to get some of the old Perry Bretonnian squires and Brian Nelson Orc Big ‘Uns… but the cost was just too ridiculous; I mean, I could afford it if I really wanted to but the price just leaves a bad taste and in all honesty the money should be spent on smaller companies that need our support more).

I am not intending to re-base any of my units and most of them will be put on 20mm square bases as I base them up. If needed for a tournament in future I will just put a surround around the entire unit to give it the correct width frontage. These units just look better ranked up close in a tight formation.

For cavalry though, they never sat next to each other properly so I will put spacers between them to put them at the correct width, and this will also mean they can actually rank up. The White Lions also had to be based on 25mm squares as I tried unsuccessfully to rank them up as a unit on 20mm squares and I just couldn’t get it to work at all.

Some inspiration for what I am going for with the general colours and look is below (used without permission, will be removed if requested). The dominant colours will be red, white/silver, and gold with yellow and to a lesser extent green as spot colours.

I am going for a Chrace theme of red and white (hence the White Lions also—a great unit in 5^th edition WHFB but not so amazing in The Old World) with the story of the army being that they are a Chrace garrison force primarily defending their shores against Dark Elf raids and being next to Nagarythe there will also be a heavy Shadow Warrior presence in the army (the shadow warriors have always been my favourite High Elf unit and they still seem pretty tough in this edition).

The old plastic monopose models, though people always hated them, were perfect for the massed ranked regiment look I thought, and they are my favourite version of the High Elves. I will be inspired by Rick Priestley’s guide for painting a large High Elf army fast from White Dwarf 192. The core idea of this is that the idea of painting a Warhammer army is that it should look good en masse so the overall effect is more important than spending a large amount of time on each individual model… still good advice I think though it is hard to put down a model that seems unfinished but you really actually don’t need to do any more than basecoat and wash infantry figures for them to look good as a unit as a whole. I’ll need to find the right medium here to ensure the army gets finished but also is something I am happy with.